THE BOOK OF AHIKAR

"There was a Vizier in the days of King Sennacherib, King of Assyria and Nineveh, a wise man named Ahikar, and he was Vizier of the King, Sennacherib."

"Son, if thy doorposts be loftily built to heaven, as it were seven ells, whenever thou enterest, bow thy head."

THE BOOK OF AHIKAR

(INTRODUCTION)

HE recent recovery in Egypt of a papyrus fragment of the Ahikar book, dating from at least the fifth century before Christ, has been one of the most interesting events of Egyptian exploration, and a most striking proof of the accuracy of modern scientific theory. Scholars have long known that there must have been a story of the wise vizier, Ahikar, among the world's very early tales. They knew also that it was a popular and honored tale among the preChristian Jews; for the apocryphal Book of Tobit speaks of the Ahikar story as being of similar character to itself. Other references to Ahikar, the sage, and to his wise sayings, appear in ancient authors. Moreover, while no Jewish copy of the Ahikar story was known to exist, a medieval Book of Ahikar was popular throughout the East. Manuscripts of it were common in Arabic, in Syrian, and in Armenian, and were known in other tongues.

In these medieval manuscripts the sayings of Ahikar strongly resembled passages in several of the Hebrew Biblical books, especially the Book of Psalms and that of Proverbs. Of course, these sayings in Ahikar might have been copied from the Bible, but scholars were already questioning whether some form of the Book of Ahikar might not be the earlier work. And then this Egyptian fragment was discovered. It is written in the Aramaic tongue, the speech in common use among the Jews of the fifth century B.C. includes not only the story of Ahikar, but fragments of his proverbs; and as it is clearly not the original form of the Ahikar tale, the deduction that the first account of the life and sayings of the ancient sage must date almost back to the Assyrian days in which he is represented as dwelling. That is, the story could not have originated later than 600

It

B.C.

This gives it an antiquity probably equaling, if not exceeding, that of the Biblical books which it resembles.

Why the Book of Ahikar was not included in the Hebrew canon, and thus preserved with the Scriptures, we can no longer tell. For some reason it was obviously regarded as less holy than other similar works of later date. Perhaps it was not originally a Jewish book at all, but a Babylonian one translated into Aramaic because of its popularity. We thus open with this "rejected" book a possible vista of very ancient Babylonian stories.

As to the story of Ahikar, we give the book here first in its Armenian version. None of our surviving medieval manuscripts of the book seem very old, except those of Armenia. There we can trace the tale back to the year A.D. 500 or even earlier. Hence the Armenian gives us the story in the oldest version known until our recent Egyptian discovery. That fragmentary Egyptian papyrus is then given by itself, as nearly as our scholars have been able to decipher and translate it. Thus the reader may see for himself the changes and vagaries which the story and its proverbs underwent in the thousand years which separated the Egyptian and the Armenian manuscripts. The later Arabic and Syrian versions do not differ much from the Armenian.